Intelligence Squared

Jaron Lanier is one of the foremost digital visionaries of our times. One of Silicon Valley’s key early innovators, this dreadlocked digital prophet has been dubbed the ‘father of virtual reality’ and named as one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. A former goatherd and midwife, and a virtuoso player of rare instruments, Lanier is sometimes called the ‘alternative Steve Jobs’. Neither a tech optimist nor a doom-monger, he is unique for always seeing the opportunities offered by technology as well as the dangers. In bestsellers such as You Are Not A Gadget and Who Owns the Future? he sounded an early warning about the perils of the internet – describing the tech giants as ‘spy agencies’ and ‘lords of the clouds’ for the way they reduce the value of humans to that of the data they provide. But he has also proposed another, more imaginative way to use technology. A ‘human-centered approach’, he argues, ‘leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machin